One or more aspects relate, in general, to processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to garbage collection processing within the computing environment.
Garbage collection is an automatic memory management process that identifies objects in memory that are no longer being referenced and frees those objects. As memory objects of varying sizes are allocated and later freed, the memory in which they are stored becomes increasingly fragmented. Eventually, very few large free areas of memory exist, and it becomes difficult to store additional objects without increasing the memory size. When this occurs, a process within garbage collection, referred to as compaction, is employed in order to consolidate the allocated objects into one large area, leaving another large area of free space available for new objects. During consolidation, the memory objects that are still being referenced are moved from one area of memory to another area of memory.
Conventionally, when garbage collection is performed on an object storage area, applications using the object storage area are required to pause execution. One reason for this is to determine whether the pointers to the objects used by the applications to access the objects are still valid, since the objects may have moved. These pauses, occasionally several seconds long, prevent the applications from being used for time-sensitive tasks, such as transaction processing, real-time games, or mechanical control. Thus, a need exists for an optimized garbage collection process.